NARRATION: President Lincoln was now turning his attention to healing the nation's wounds when he gave his second inaugural address.

CHRISTOPHER DENSMORE: Lincoln’s second Inaugural, when he talks about slavery, he doesn’t talk about it as saying that those Confederates, you know, our enemies have been supporting. He talks about this as something that we have done…a shared responsibility. With that shared responsibility, is shared responsibility... if you’ve all broken something…you’ve all got some responsibility for helping to put it back together.

NARRATION: Kevin Bacon’s great grandmother was a part of this effort to help rebuild the nation. Lydia Atkinson, a Quaker born in 1843, was just twenty years old, when she heeded the President’s call for service. Deep in the stacks of the Friends Library, Densmore discovered Lydia Atkinson’s journals. Inside are vivid accounts of her journey from new jersey to Washington, DC., where she would start a job as a teacher in a school established to educate newly freed slaves.

DENSMORE: Atkinson in the 1860’s is following a tradition that has been going for more than 100 years. When Quakers manumitted slaves, there is a concern for what happens to free people. If we dismantle slavery, what happens to that person? Are they simply gonna be unemployed, beg from house to house and die in a ditch? And so by the 1750s, Quakers have become heavily involved with African American education.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: Your great grandmother was a 21-year-old Quaker from New Jersey teaching freed slaves in a government camp, just as the Civil War ended. Could you turn to page 16?

GATES: This is a page of the diary of Lydia Atkinson. Isn’t that great just to be able to see that?

KEVIN BACON: Yeah. Yeah.

GATES: We’ve transcribed it, would you be kind enough to read that?

BACON: Sure. "I have over forty pupils in all,—men, women and children. We had a visitor a few days since,—a Southern lady; and I could not help feeling a gratified pride as I remarked her wondering face, and heard her expressions of surprise, when the little ones pointed out on the map every state from Maine to Texas, repeating (I couldn’t do that) repeating accurately, and without prompting, the capital of each. (There’s no way I could do that). And when she saw the writing and heard the reading of the different classes, she said she had thought the teaching of such a school would be an unpleasant task, but she believed she would quite enjoy it.”

BACON: Wow, what a thing to choose to do with your life.

GATES: Yeah. What a commitment.

BACON: Yeah.

Print Transcript